Drama: An Actor's Education

Once I settled into the run of the show, Jean and I sought out another temporary housing situation. Back in New Jersey, my parents were now living outside of Princeton, renting a farmhouse surrounded by soybean fields near the village of Plainsboro. There was plenty of room for my family of three, so we moved in. I commuted daily to New York for my shows. Every night I sat on the train and read the next morning’s edition of the New York Times. It was filled with coverage of the Watergate hearings and of the epic downfall of Richard Nixon. The extended Lithgow family, like the rest of liberal America, basked in the warm glow of political schadenfreude. My parents loved our company. In the sunny New Jersey countryside, Ian was in toddler heaven. My father and I replayed every game of the historic chess face-off in Iceland between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. On a day off from the show, the cast of The Changing Room traveled down en masse for a picnic in the expansive yard of the Plainsboro house. For Jean and me, it was the happiest time in our marriage.

But there was something seriously wrong with this picture. My mother, my father, and my little sister, Sarah Jane, had moved out of Princeton, having lost their university-owned apartment. My father was no longer employed by Princeton University. He was out of a job. During a sabbatical from his duties as artistic director of McCarter Theatre, the Princeton administration had seized the moment to unceremoniously fire him. While my parents’ pride might have spurred them to move far away from the source of such an indignity, they had a compelling reason to stay in the area. Having lived in Princeton for eleven years, Sarah Jane was the only one of their children to spend all of her childhood in the same school system, the only one who had never suffered the trauma of being the new kid in town. Mom and Dad wanted to spare her that. They wanted her to finish up at Princeton High School before they left. So they had rented the Plainsboro farmhouse, doing their best to put on a brave face, enjoy a far less stressful life, and avoid all thoughts, as they surveyed the vast fields surrounding them, of being put out to pasture.

When my father was let go from Princeton, the rationale handed down from above was that the quality of the company’s work had slipped. Arthur Lithgow, they declared, was no longer achieving a sufficiently “exciting” level of theatrical fare. This explanation enraged me, especially as it was couched in the fatuous phrases of Ivy League doublespeak. What did a bunch of stuffy, hidebound academics know about professional theater? Who did they think they were? And what the hell did they mean by “exciting”?! But beneath my indignation there was a hidden strain of guilt. My father had lost his job for many of the very reasons that I had chosen to stop working for him. Like his Princeton employers, I had wanted something better. I had left his company at the very moment when he most needed my support. And now my career had taken off like a rocket just as his had suffered a devastating setback. He was fifty-seven years old, eight years younger than I am as I write these words, and he had no idea where he was going next.

For both my father and me, it was a season of deep conflict and painful contradiction. Success was countered by failure, pride by guilt, soaring confidence by gnawing doubt. I suppose that my dad’s circumspect nature stood him in good stead during that time. It was certainly a boon to me. I can only imagine his hidden feelings of injury and humiliation caused by his treatment at the hands of Princeton University. He must certainly have succumbed to occasional spasms of envy directed at Arvin Brown, and personal hurt that I had chosen Arvin’s theater over his. But outwardly he remained his sweet and genial self. To my eyes his delight in the success of The Changing Room was warm and genuine. He welcomed the cast to his home with effusive good will. If the events of the preceding year had taken their toll on him, he never showed it. He never betrayed a hint of self-pity nor made the slightest bid for sympathy. He may have revealed his bitterness and disappointment to my mother, but none of us saw a glimpse of it. Only in retrospect have I come to see what a Herculean effort that must have been for him. By keeping his pain to himself, he allowed me my first undiluted taste of success in a profession that had treated him shabbily and without mercy. It was a father’s selfless gift to a son. I love him for it.

[25] Mr. Pleasant

It is not for nothing that an actor is said to “give a performance.” At its essence, acting is a gift to an audience, whether that gift is delivered from a stage or a screen. An actor gives something to an audience and, with any luck, the audience gives him something in return. When this curious transaction is successful, everybody is happy. The audience is elated and the actor is fulfilled. Things get a little warped when the actor loses sight of his mission, when he forgets its essential generosity, when he feels that he is not getting his due, that his audience is not sufficiently responsive, grateful, adulatory. At such moments, another diva is born and unleashed on the world. All actors are susceptible to this syndrome. Every single one of us. Applause is a narcotic, and we’re all prone to addiction. The great challenge is to always remember a simple truth: that acting is not about us, it’s about them. I once worked with an actor who had forgotten that truth long before, if indeed he had ever known it at all.

I’m disinclined to defame this man, so I’ll call him Rock. Rock Masters. I acted with him in a movie. I’ll return to him in a moment.

Photograph by Martha Swope. Courtesy Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

After the heady success of The Changing Room, I spent an entire year on Broadway performing in a dopey play called My Fat Friend. This was a campy four- character British farce whose main plot line concerned the drastic weight loss of its portly young leading lady. The play was a forgettable trifle, considerably elevated by the blithe performances of two terrific actors, Lynn Redgrave and George Rose. In the role of their dour, young Scottish flatmate, I had a great time playing second banana to these two expert comedians. I admired them both deeply and loved their bubbly comradeship. Besides, a year’s salary on Broadway was an unaccustomed luxury. It allowed Jean, Ian, and me to set up New York housekeeping again, in a bigger apartment with a comfortable, predictable daily life. But due to an insecurity born of my earlier hard times in the city, I clung to the show for far too long. After an entire year on Broadway, I joined Lynn and George on tour to Detroit and Toronto. When that was over, I still couldn’t let go. I soldiered on without them in a slapdash New Jersey stock production of the play at the Paramus Playhouse on the Mall. A year of weekly paychecks had created a severe dependency in me, and I desperately needed to break it. A change was long overdue.

Happily, a filmmaker friend of mine came calling. Him I will call Paolo. Paolo had dreamed up a deliciously lurid suspense film set in Europe. I’ll call it Interdit. Shooting was all set to start and he wanted me to be in it.

Interdit was second-generation Alfred Hitchcock. The leading role in the film is a man who falls in love with a much younger woman. This infatuation pulls him out of a long period of his life during which he has grimly buried himself in his work. The man has a longtime best friend who appears to have grave doubts about the disturbing intensity of his old friend’s love for the young girl. But true to the film’s Hitchcockian antecedents, the friend’s kind-hearted concern is not all that it appears to be. I played the devious best friend. The starring role was played by Rock Masters. Working with him would prove to be more than just a job. It was an education.

By this time in his career, Rock Masters was running on fumes. He was navigating the rough waters of a middle-aged leading man’s faltering career. His genial manner was tinged with desperation. For him, starring in Interdit was a chance to regain some lost credibility in the movie business. The plot of the film paired the two of us in a complex psychological chess game, full of mystery, duplicity, and shocking revelations. It was a meaty on-screen relationship, the kind most actors would kill for. I had practically salivated when I first read the script. I suspect that Rock was pretty excited, too. But he could have been forgiven for feeling a little concerned when he learned that he would be partnered with an unknown, untested New York theater actor half his age.

When the film’s cast and crew assembled on location in Europe, things started off promisingly enough. As so